SEA ISLE, N.J. — Public-sector employees here now are regularly referring to Gov. Chris Christie as "Adolf Christie." Things got especially ugly when Christie signed legislation that requires each of the state's 500,000 teachers, police and other public workers to pay more for their pensions and health benefits and eliminates the issue for four years from collective bargaining.

In this traditionally Democrat state, Republican Christie was victorious in a legislature with solid Democrat majorities, successfully arguing that the current and projected pension and health benefits for public-sector employees are unaffordable and unsustainable.

Advocating spending cuts rather than tax increases, Christie pressed the points that New Jersey already has the highest real estate taxes in the nation and that actuary studies show the state's pension and health funding is $110 billion short of eventual liabilities.

New Jersey's taxpayers pay an average of $7,576 per year in property taxes.

Under new legislation, public-sector workers will be assessed a portion of their health care premiums based on how much they earn. After a four-year phase-in period, employees who make $60,000, for instance, will see their annual health insurance payments more than double, from the current 1.5 percent of salary ($900) to 3.4 percent for single coverage ($2,040) and more than triple for a family plan to 5.4 percent of salary ($3,240).

These higher contributions from state employees will amount to "27 percent of the premium cost for single coverage and 17 percent for family coverage," reported the Philadelphia Inquirer. "A Kaiser Family Foundation survey last year found that workers with employer-sponsored health plans paid 19 percent of the premium on average for single coverage and 30 percent for family coverage."

New Jersey's public-sector workers, in short, after the four-year phase-in, will still be paying only 57 percent of what employees are paying on average in employer-sponsored family plans as a percent of premium costs. That's not exactly Auschwitz.

A neighbor of ours here has a newly divorced daughter with three young children. She said last week that her daughter is losing her house because she can't afford the $10,500 in yearly property taxes. In a different way than Cryan, she also sees it as "neighbor against neighbor" when the ever-expanding price of paying for the health and pension benefits of her public-sector neighbors makes it impossible for her to keep her own home...MORE...LINK